Abstract
How did Victorian women theorise ‘sexual inversion’? The relative cultural marginalisation of women and their exclusion from the scientific sphere meant that the theorisation of female same-sex desire — its labelling and classification within the new field of sexology — initially had little formal involvement by women. However, the theorisation of ‘sex’, understood in terms of a politics of gender, was a shared concern for many, mainly middle-class, women whose voices increasingly started to be heard in the second-half of the nineteenth-century. Within the English-speaking world, the emerging feminist discourses became associated with the label of the so-called ‘New Woman’, an expression which was coined by the writer Sarah Grand in 18941 although the concept already circulated from the early 1880s onward, denoting what Teresa Mangum calls ‘representations of women that confronted the self-negating, submissive image of middle-class Ideal Womanhood’.2 Precisely ‘who or what the New Woman of the 1880s and 1890s was’, as Ruth Robbins has recently argued, ‘very much depended on who was defining her’, which neatly sums up the diversity of both historical New Woman discourses and modern assessments of the phenomenon.3 For it is fair to say that New Woman feminists agreed on very little beyond the fact that they considered the so-called ‘woman question’ key to frequently opposing political, social and scientific debates that could range from the social purity concerns of someone like Grand, who separated from her husband to live with another woman but as a supporter of eugenics championed sexual restraint and the re-evaluation of middle-class marriage, to the radical feminist politics of writer Mona Caird, who rejected the conventions of marriage and ideas about the ‘naturalness’ of the maternal outright but was herself a mother.4
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Notes
Sarah Grand, ‘The New Aspect of the Woman Question’, North American Review 158 (1894), 270–276. In the same volume Ouida published ‘The New Aspect of the Woman Question’, North American Review 158 (1894), 610–19, an attack against the feminist movement. The new feminism was of course not confined to Anglo-American contexts but like sexology it was inflected according to different national contexts.
See for instance Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siècle France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
Teresa Mangum, Married, Middlebrow, and Militant: Sarah Grand and the New Woman Novel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 2.
Ruth Robbins, Pater to Forster, 1873–1924 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 159.
For a definition of the term see Talia Schaffer, ‘“Nothing but Foolscap and Ink”: Inventing the New Woman’, in Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis (eds), The New Woman in Fiction and Fact (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 39–52.
See for example Ann Heilmann, New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, and Mona Caird (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004);
Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis (eds), The New Woman in Fiction and Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001);
and Laurel Brake’s ‘case study’, ‘Writing Women’s History: “The Sex” Debates of 1889’, in Ann Heilmann and Margaret Beetham, New Woman Hybridities: Femininity, Feminism and International Consumer Culture, 1880–1930 (London: Routledge, 2004), 51–71. For a succinct contextualisation of emergent eugenic discourses see Richardson, Love and Eugenics in the Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 1–32.
Ledger, ‘The New Woman and the Crisis of Victorianism’, 23. Richardson, Love and Eugenics, 6. See also Ann Heilmann, New Women Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave Feminism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000).
Lyn Pykett, The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (London: Routledge, 1992), 138.
Susan Shapiro, ‘The Mannish New Woman: Punch and its Precursors’, Review of English Studies Vol. XLII no 168 (1991), 510–22.
See also Patricia Marks, Bicycles, Bangs and Bloomers: The New Woman in the Popular Press (University of Kentucky Press, 1990);
Carolyn Christensen Nelson, A New Woman Reader: Fictions, Articles and Drama of the 1890s (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2001).
Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: Feminism, Sex and Morality (London: Tauris, 2001), 288.
Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 122–4.
For same-sex histories see, for instance, Laura Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern Lesbian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000);
Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998);
Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007);
Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–1928 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994);
Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–c.1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989);
Sally Ledger, ‘In Darkest England: The Terror of Degeneration in Fin de Siècle Britain’, Literature and History 4.2 (1995), 71–86.
Mrs H. Ellis, Stories and Essays (Berkeley: Free Spirit Press, 1924), vol. 1, 42. The early works on Schreiner including a biography written by her husband provide good insights into the major stages in her life and her influences.
S.C. Cronwright-Schreiner, The Life of Olive Schreiner (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1924);
Vera Buchanan-Gould, Not Without Honour: The Life and Writing of Olive Schreiner (London: Hutchinson, 1949);
Michael Harmel, Olive Schreiner (Cape Town: Real Printing and Publishing Company, 1955);
Olive Schreiner, The Letters of Olive Schreiner 1876–1920, ed. S.C. Cronwright-Schreiner (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1924).
Joseph Bristow, ‘Introduction’, in Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), xxiii.
For an overview of late-Victorian anti-feminist debates, see Ann Heilmann, ‘Introduction’, in The Late Victorian Marriage Question: A Collection of Key New Women Texts, Volume V. Literary Degenerates (London: Thoemmes Press, 1998), xi–xix.
Schreiner was given a copy of Spencer’s First Principles (1862) in 1871 by the Free-Thinker Willie Bertram, whose visit to Hermon mission station where she lived at the time inspired the chapter ‘Waldo’s stranger’. See Bristow’s ‘A Chronology of Olive Schreiner’, in The Story of an African Farm, xxxiii; and Ruth First and Ann Scott, Olive Schreiner: A Biography (1980; New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1990), 58–60.
Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 80. Subsequent page numbers are inserted in the text.
Penelope A. LeFew, ‘Schopenhauerian Pessimism in Olive Schreiner’s A Story of an African Farm and From Man to Man’, English Literature in Transition 37.3 (1994), 303–16.
Heike Bauer, ‘Is there a History of Female Cross-Dressing?’, in Heike Bauer (ed.), Women and Cross-Dressing, vol.1 (London: Routledge, 2006), xiii—xxxvii.
Ada Leverson ‘Suggestion’ (1895);
Victoria Cross, ‘Theodora: A Fragment’ (1895),
both reprinted in Elaine Showalter (ed.), Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers at the Fin de Siècle (London: Virago, 1993).
Sarah Grand, Two Dear Little Feet (London: Jarrold & Sons, 1880).
Edwin Ray Lankester, Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism (London: Macmillan, 1880), 33.
See Ernst Haeckel, The History of Creation: or the Development of the Earth and Its Inhabitants by the Action of Natural Causes, trans. E. Ray Lankester (London: King, 1876).
Richard J. Evans situates Haeckel’s work in the broader context of German Darwinism in his ‘In Search of German Social Darwinism: The History and Historiography of a Concept’, in Manfred Berg and Geoffrey Cocks (eds), Medicine and Modernity: Public Health and Medical Care in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 55–79.
Nick Hopwood, ‘Producing a Socialist Popular Science in the Weimar Republic’, History Workshop Journal 41 (1996), 117–53. Pick, Faces of Degeneration, 28–30
Olive Schreiner, Woman and Labour (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1911), 54–5. Morag Shiach provides a convincing analysis of how Schreiner redefines gender division in terms of socio-economic productivity in her Modernism, Labour, and Selfhood in British Literature and Culture, 1880–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 50–4.
Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 167.
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Volume 2: Sexchanges (London: Yale University Press, 1989), 47–82.
Ruth First and Ann Scott, Olive Schreiner: A Biography (1980; New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1990), 97.
For a succinct analysis of the recent debates see Liz Stanley, Imperialism, Labour and the New Woman: Olive Schreiner’s Social Theory (Durham: sociologypress, 2002), 119–33.
Carolyn Burdett presents an illuminating analysis of Schreiner’s multiple influences in her Olive Schreiner and the Progress of Feminism, Evolution, Gender and Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 17–45.
Carol Barash, ‘Virile Womanhood: Olive Schreiner’s Narratives of a Master Race’, in Elaine Showalter (ed.), Speaking of Gender (New York: Routledge, 1989), 269–81;
Laura Chrisman, ‘Empire, “Race” and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle: the Work of George Egerton and Olive Schreiner’, in Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken (eds), Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 45–65;
Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York: Routledge, 1995), 258–95.
Edward Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches Into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art and Custom: Volume I (London: John Murray, 1871), 34. On the same page, he replaces ‘degradation’ with ‘degeneration’.
See Joseph Bristow, Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World (London: Harper Collins, 1991). Feminist readings frequently link colonised Africa to the repressed female body; see McClintock, Imperial Leather, 241–4.
William Greenslade, ‘Fitness and the Fin de Siècle’;, in John Stokes (ed.), Fin de Siècle/Fin de Globe: Fears and Fantasies of the Late Nineteenth Century (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992), 37–51.
Lyndall Gregg (Dot Schreiner), Memoirs of Olive Schreiner (London and Edinburgh: W&R Chambers, 1957), 13.
Laura Chrisman, ‘Allegory, Feminist Thought and the Dream of Olive Schreiner’, in Tony Brown, (ed.) Edward Carpenter and Late-Victorian Radicalism (London: Frank Cass, 1990), 126–49.
Catherine Gallagher, ‘The Body versus the Social Body in The Works of Thomas Malthus and Henry Mayhew’ in Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (eds), The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth-Century (Berkley: University of California Press, 1987), 83–106.
See also Roy Porter, ‘The Body and the Mind, The Doctor and the Patient: Negotiating Hysteria’, in Sander Gilman, Helen King, Roy Porter, G.S. Rousseau and Elaine Showalter, Hysteria Beyond Freud (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 225–85.
Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: From Charlotte Brontë to Doris Lessing (1977, London: Virago, 1993, rev. edn), 205–7; Pykett, The ‘Improper’ Feminine, 159–60 and 174–6. Robbins, Pater to Foster, 173–9; Ledger, ‘The New Woman and the Crisis of Victorianism’, 32–4.
Beth Sutton-Ramspeck, Raising the Dust: The Literary Housekeeping of Mary Ward, Sarah Grand and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 2004), 3.
Michel Foucauld, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: an Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 54–5.
See Stephanie Forward, ‘Introduction’, in Ann Heilmann and Stephanie Forward (eds), Sex, Social Purity and Sarah Grand (London: Routledge, 2000), vols 2, 3.
Adam Seth Lowenstein, ‘“Not a Novel, Nor Even a Well-Ordered Story”; Formal Experimentation and Psychological Innovation in Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins’, Studies in the Novel, 39.4 (2007), 433.
Sarah Grand, The Heavenly Twins (New York: Cassell, 1893). All subsequent references to this edition are inserted into the main text.
Janet Wood, Passion and Pathology In Victorian Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 174.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1893), reprinted in Showalter (ed.), Daughters of Decadence, 98–138.
Matilda Betham-Edwards wrote a brief outline of Blackwell’s medical career, which was posthumously published in Betham-Edwards’s Mid-Victorian Memories, which was introduced by Sarah Grand, another of Betham-Edwards’s friends. This small circle exemplifies the way ideas might have travelled. Matilda Betham-Edwards (1836–1919), Mid-Victorian Memories (London: John Murray, 1919), 143–7. See also Esther Pohl Lovejoy, Women Doctors of the World (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 31;
and Stephanie Forward, ‘Introduction’, in Ann Heilmann and Stephanie Forward (eds), Sex, Social Purity and Sarah Grand (London: Routledge, 2000), vol.1, 1.
See Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality, 1885–1914 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), 95–123;
Frank Mort, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England Since 1830 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 69–76.
Elizabeth Blackwell, The Human Element in Sex Being an Enquiry into the Relation of Sexual Physiology to Christian Morality (London: J & A Churchill, 1884).
Edith Ward, The Vital Question: An Address on Social Purity to all English-Speaking Women (London: Percy Lund, 1892), 11 and 8.
Sarah Grand, ‘Preface’, Emotional Moments (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1908), x–xi.
Havelock Ellis, My Life (Toronto: William Heinemann, 1940), 220.
Chris White, ‘“She Was Not Really Man At All: The Lesbian Practice and Politics of Edith Ellis’”, in Elaine Hobby and Chris White (eds), What Lesbians Do in Books (London: The Women’s Press, 1991), 69.
Jo-Ann Wallace, ‘The Case of Edith Ellis’, in Hugh Stevens and Caroline Howlett (eds), Modernist Sexualities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 15.
Esther Leslie, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (London: Pluto, 2000), 3.
A bibliography of her work is included in Isaac Goldberg, Havelock Ellis: A Biographical and Critical Survey (London: Constable and Company, 1926), 353.
Mrs Havelock Ellis (Edith Ellis), Democracy in the Kitchen (Haslemere: no publisher, 1894), 2.
Mrs Havelock Ellis (Edith Ellis), A Noviciate for Marriage (Haslemere: no publisher, 1894).
Mrs Havelock Ellis (Edith Ellis), ‘The Masses and the Classes: A Plea’, Lecture given in Ancoats in 1893, published 1894 (no publication details).
See also Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People of London (1889; London: Macmillan, 1892).
See Phyllis Grosskurth, Havelock Ellis: A Biography (New York: New York University Press, 1980), 62–8.
Ruth Brandon, The New Women and the Old Men: Love, Sex and the Woman Question (London: Papermac, 1990), 99. Havelock was also a member.
Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling, The Woman Question (London: Swann Sonnenschein, Le Bas and Lowrey, 1886), 12. See also Ledger’s analysis in The New Woman, 122–5. Stanley Imperialism, Labour and the New Woman, 24–5.
Mrs Havelock Ellis (Edith Ellis), Attainment (London: Alston Rivers, 1909), 8. All subsequent page references to this edition will be inserted into the text.
Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1852–53; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 82.
Birth control was for a long time associated with ‘improper’ behaviour. In 1877, Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh were tried for distributing a small tract on birth control on grounds of its ‘obscenity’. See Lesley A. Hall, ‘Sexual Culture in Britain: Some Persisting Themes’, in Franz Eder, Lesley A. Hall and Gert Hekma (eds), Sexual Cultures in Europe: National Histories (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 37 and 45–6.
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© 2009 Heike Bauer
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Bauer, H. (2009). When Sex Is Gender: Feminist Inversion and the Limits of Same-Sex Theory. In: English Literary Sexology. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234086_4
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